Design Challenge: “Reconstruction” at Parsons School of Design

While established designers presented their collections last Thursday, the final day of Fashion Week, aspiring créateurs were putting on a different kind of show at Parsons School of Design’s Storefront Gallery. Ten pairs of student designers spent the day constructing—or more precisely, repurposing existing garments into—something special and deeply personal, all in full view of intrigued passersby. The project, called Reconstruction, started with a gift of fabrics—samples, runway pieces, and other luxe leftovers—from Louis Vuitton. These clothes, along with ten boxes of vintage pieces, were allotted to the design teams (they got to select what they wanted, round-robin style, at 9:00 a.m.). Then came the hard part: The students, all seniors (and all by the look of things insanely talented), were charged with rethinking those original garments, chopping them up, totally reconceiving them, and remaking them into something incredibly new and wild and different. For Gabrielle Arruda this meant dyeing the tulle she had selected in the school’s bathroom sink, sticking it in the dryer for two and a half hours and then painstakingly reworking it into a gorgeous if shredded princess-Goth gown. “They told us to push it further,” she said, laughing. “To go all out with volume and creativity.” (Her design partner may have attempted to push a little too far—in an excess of zeal, she cut her hand and had to rush to the emergency room. But she was soon back, bandaged but sewing.) The influence of Comme des Garçons, it must be said, was everywhere apparent—in the masculine/feminine combinations of suiting and tulle; in a silk gazar coat that became a kilt; in a jacket’s shoulder, sprouting high ridges and made, according to the design team Stacey Cunningham and Jacqueline Carrillo (take a look at their sketch in the below slideshow), of place mats and stockings and stuffed with phone cords. (&ldquo;We took it off the wall,” Cunningham confessed. “Nobody stopped us.”) Many of the designs had elaborate details on a single shoulder for a good reason—the clothes will eventually be worn by musicians of the Nouveau Classical Project, and they need one plain side on which to rest their instruments. At 7:00 p.m., a panel of judges—Harold Koda, the Met Museum Costume Institute’s head curator; television personality Robert Verdi, Esquire fashion director Nick Sullivan, and Sugar Vendil, Nouveau Classical’s artistic director—picked the winner from a highly competitive playing field. The laurels went to an explosion of khaki by Min Sun Kim and Yeo Chung Kim, who will each receive $2,500 and, even more valuable, an audience with Louis Vuitton president and CEO Daniel Lalonde, who was present at the judging. Strolling from mannequin to mannequin, Koda said that he was frankly astonished at the level of craftsmanship. “What’s also really interesting is that there’s no sense of recycling in any of it, despite the fact that they’ve repurposed garments,” he mused. “The results look sui generis.”